Each site alone, or as a district
Three meanings of zero waste
The term is used in three ways. Zero Waste Districts works with the third.
Why districts
A district is a boundary the city sets, of about a square kilometre. It is large enough to make shared systems viable, and small enough for the people involved to agree and act. On its own, a restaurant does not serve enough covers to keep a dishwashing line busy, a hotel kitchen produces too little clean food waste to justify a composter, and no refurbisher will set up for one office tower that refits every few years. Grouped in a district, their volumes are enough to keep that equipment running. A whole city has the volume too, but also hundreds of owners, public tenders and electoral cycles that slow every decision.
Objectives
Priority areas
How a district is built
What changes at each site
Interventions are worked in the same order everywhere, from redesign down to organics.
Shared infrastructure
Five stages
Nothing is built until the flows have been weighed. Plants running far below capacity because the material never arrived, or arrived contaminated, are one of the most common problems in the sector, and every district follows the same five stages to avoid it.
Benefits for each group
Everyone involved gets something different out of a district.
Partners and roles
A district depends on cooperation between organisations that rarely sit at the same table. Each one has a clear part to play.
The challenge in numbers
The first cohort
Twelve districts in seven countries: six already running in Malaysia, Chile and Kenya, and six confirmed in Brazil, Indonesia, Türkiye and Azerbaijan. They work from the same playbooks and report in the same format, so improvements found in one district reach the others quickly. Cohort 1 runs through 2027.
Public progress
Every district has a public page, refreshed on a fixed schedule. Staff at the bin see what their sorting achieves, and published results help a programme continue through a change of administration.
Frequently asked questions
